The Acts Of Paul

c. 150-200 C.E.

The Acts of Paul were by far the most popular of the
apocryphal acts, spawning a great deal of Christian art and
secondary literature, as well as a cult which venerated Thecla,
the young girl who accompanies Paul on his missionary journeys.
The Acts were considered orthodox by Hippolytus, as well as other
writers as late as the mid-fourth century, but were eventually
rejected by the church when heretical groups like the Manichaeans
began to adopt them. Still, some late Greek texts of the Epistles
to Timothy contain alternate passages that appear to be derived
from the Acts.

The Acts of Paul were often coupled with the Third Letter of
Paul to the Corinthians, which was regarded as authentically
Pauline by the Syrian and Armenian churches. Originally a
separate work, it was likely written around the time of the
pastoral epistles and conjoined with the later Acts only after it
had been excluded from most Pauline collections. The letter was
written primarily to combat Gnostic and Marcionite doctrine which
utilized other Pauline works for anti-semitic means. This epistle
has survived in several extant manuscripts, as have the stories
of Thecla and the account of Paul's beheading in Rome; the
remainder of the Acts exist only in fragmentary Greek texts from
the third century, and Coptic texts from the fifth.

The author, who is unknown, does not appear to show any
dependence upon the canonical Acts, instead utilizing other oral
traditions of Paul's preaching and missionary work. He likely
wrote in Asia Minor near the end of the second century.

(A translation of III Corinthians, as well as an analysis of
its relationship to the rest of the Pauline corpus, can be found
in Gerd Lüdemann's Heretics,
Wesminster John Knox Press, 1996.)